“Sometimes ordinary people understand something that we, the experts, don’t,” she told the conference.
The idea of nudging, based on the research of economists including Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, who both spoke in London, gained traction after the global financial crisis, when governments wanted to achieve more but spend less.
The U.S. and Australian governments also have behavioral insight units, which use methodical randomized controlled trials to test different interventions, observing human behavior before recommending a particular policy.
Sex selective abortions, especially common in Asia, are responsible for between 100 million and 160 million “missing girls” globally, around the same as the number of women living in the U.S., said Iris Bohnet of Harvard University.
Changing so deep rooted a custom is not something laws alone are likely to achieve, she said. Social norms need to change.
In one study in India, giving women authority and control of significant amounts of money changed social gender norms in observable and lasting ways, though appointing women to the boards of short-term projects did not, she said.
Asking for demographic information at the start of a job application can encourage people to subconsciously play up to negative stereotypes, such as women being less assertive, or black people being less suited to the police force, something behavioral economists call “stereotype threat.”
Though “nudging” alone is unlikely to be able to stop sex-selective abortion, combining behavioral techniques with laws may be the way to solve such difficult problems, she said.
Role Models
When the British government wanted to get more women on corporate boards, it tried two separate strategies after rejecting the idea of using quotas, Bohnet said.
The first was to tell firms only 17 percent of board members of top companies were women. This did not work well. But when the government told firms that 94% of companies had at least one woman on the board, the response was much better.
Humans have a natural behavioral instinct to want to do what others are doing, so focusing on the positives, even when using exactly the same underlying data, is more likely to get people to change their actions, she said.
“Reciprocity” is another key insight from behavioral economics. People are more likely to give something up if the other party has also given something up, however small.
Restaurant tips increase when diners are given a mint, and rise even more if they are given two, while guests are more likely to reuse towels if told their hotel has already given to an environmental charity, said Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University.
